Feb 21, 2011 4
To glean the differences between a regular episode of Community and “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking,” it’s first necessary to discuss how a mockumentary actually works. While the format takes its style from documentaries, it actually very rarely mimics real life — the mockumentary is fundamentally a genre of outsized performances and ridiculous developments.
Jan 31, 2011 3
Pierce Hawthorne’s nominal allusion to the writer Nathaniel seems calculated as an ironic comment on his own rank immorality in the form of an anti-minority bias worn with shimmering scarlet pride. But Pierce’s racism is one unsavory aspect of his hopeful way of being human: inveterately deploying an insult and awaiting the closeness it will inevitably bring him with the insulted. Pierce’s racism is a racism of love.
Nov 24, 2008 0
Kara Thrace likes to drink too much and screw too often. She’s great at her job and hates her job. Her pop ditched her and her mom beat her. She hurts people who love her and pisses off everybody else. For one brief shining moment she found true love, then ditched the guy in the morning for a quickie marriage with a man she regularly cuckolds. She is without a doubt the most passionate, insane, terribly real person on TV, even if she lives on a spaceship, worships Athena, and can’t go two minutes without saying the expletive “frak” or one of its derivatives.
Nov 24, 2008 0
Sunshine makes a decent go of it for awhile. A multiracial crew of astronauts gets sent to reignite the sun—a fun twist, since most science fiction is about moving further out into the final frontier. There’s a nice lowkey chemistry onboard—the actors are playing professionals on a suicide mission, so there’s a minimum of interpersonal drama. Nothing you wouldn’t find in an office or The Office. The everpresent sun lurks in the distance.
Nov 21, 2008 0
Rallying supporters to a political cause, rallying supporters of a team, rallying the adherents of a faith, and rallying oneself to make a romantic commitment all take this form: pretending that we know something (usually about the future [i.e., "We will beat Cal"], but often about the past [i.e., "Christ died for our sins"] or the present [i.e., "The American people want change"]) that we do not and cannot empirically know. In the romantic sphere, as in political sphere, the distinction between lying and failing applies: a divorce due to marital issues does not mean that the parties lied when they said “Till death do us part”; it means that they decided, gradually or suddenly, that fidelity to the truth of their everlasting love has proved unfounded.
